ReiserFS vs XFS or JFS?

[markw-4]

I'm not a big fan of EXT[3|4] except as the boot partition as that is not
very dynamic. I have been using IBM jfs for a long time now and find it
better/faster/etc than EXT3, even on database, web, and mail servers.

IMHO:
EXT2 is great for a database journal in that you won't be double
journalling. (I often speculate that a very minimal UNIX file system
designed for purely for speed and regularly sized blocks, something like a
streamlined FAT system, would be awesome for databases.)

EXT3 is good for system boot partitions as it does not need fsck on on a
restart and the volume is likely not very dynamic.

ReiserFS (last I did any research) was pretty good when you had a lot of
small files.

IBM JFS, again, last time I did any testing, was a better choice for a
generic file system as it had a pretty good balance of journal speed and
large vs small file storage/access.

SGI's XFS I sort of abandoned (I admit I was a wimp) because I thought IBM
jfs would have better and more active development.


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[Jerry Feldman-2]

I agree that a partition used for database does not need, and probably
should not use a journalling file system if the file system is
dedicated to the database. Databases really need (or better would
like) raw access to the hardware. it really does not matter from a
performance standpoint what filesystem you use for relatively static
partitions, such as /boot. Same goes for the root file system is /home
and /var are in separate file systems.

One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
home), you might have a full fsck once a month or more frequent. But,
you can change both the interval and max count using tune2fs.

IHMO: Most users and servers probably are not going to see much benefit
from ReiserFS or JFS in normal operations. In cases where you have
specific needs, then certainly the choice of file system and parameters
needs to be done.

 On Thu, 1 May 2008 09:42:31 -0400 (EDT)
markw@... wrote:

> I'm not a big fan of EXT[3|4] except as the boot partition as that is not
> very dynamic. I have been using IBM jfs for a long time now and find it
> better/faster/etc than EXT3, even on database, web, and mail servers.
>
> IMHO:
> EXT2 is great for a database journal in that you won't be double
> journalling. (I often speculate that a very minimal UNIX file system
> designed for purely for speed and regularly sized blocks, something like a
> streamlined FAT system, would be awesome for databases.)
>
> EXT3 is good for system boot partitions as it does not need fsck on on a
> restart and the volume is likely not very dynamic.
>
> ReiserFS (last I did any research) was pretty good when you had a lot of
> small files.
>
> IBM JFS, again, last time I did any testing, was a better choice for a
> generic file system as it had a pretty good balance of journal speed and
> large vs small file storage/access.
>
> SGI's XFS I sort of abandoned (I admit I was a wimp) because I thought IBM
> jfs would have better and more active development.

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[Jerry Feldman-2]

On Thu, 1 May 2008 09:42:31 -0400 (EDT)
markw@... wrote:

> IBM JFS, again, last time I did any testing, was a better choice for a
> generic file system as it had a pretty good balance of journal speed and
> large vs small file storage/access.

But, you have to pay a fee to SCO for this :-)

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[Derek Atkins]

Jerry Feldman <gaf@...> writes:

> One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
> a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
> home), you might have a full fsck once a month or more frequent. But,
> you can change both the interval and max count using tune2fs.

Why are you rebooting your laptop that frequently?!?  My laptop
uptime averages in the 14-21 day timeframe.  I have to reboot periodically
to perform some win32-only pcmcia-requiring functions so that's usually
the reason for the reboot.

> IHMO: Most users and servers probably are not going to see much benefit
>>From ReiserFS or JFS in normal operations. In cases where you have
> specific needs, then certainly the choice of file system and parameters
> needs to be done.

My biggest beef with reiserfs is that if your system ever crashes
(power hit, kernel bug, hardware problem, etc) you have a LARGE
liklihood of losing your whole filesystem.  No thank you, I'd like
my data to stay on the disk and remain accessible even if someone
pulls the plug on my system.

-derek

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[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 11:43 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> I agree that a partition used for database does not need, and probably
> should not use a journalling file system if the file system is
> dedicated to the database. Databases really need (or better would
> like) raw access to the hardware. it really does not matter from a
> performance standpoint what filesystem you use for relatively static
> partitions, such as /boot. Same goes for the root file system is /home
> and /var are in separate file systems.
>
> One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
> a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
> home)

On the bright side, we're getting much better with suspend/resume. My
T61 suspends and resumes perfectly every time these days, and
docking/undocking is also working flawlessly (including hotplugging the
PCI-e FireWire 800 card in my dock and the devices hooked to it and my
external monitor).


> IHMO: Most users and servers probably are not going to see much benefit
> from ReiserFS or JFS in normal operations. In cases where you have
> specific needs, then certainly the choice of file system and parameters
> needs to be done.

Nb: one notable drawback of both JFS and XFS: while you can increase
partition sizes, its impossible to shrink a partition. No such
limitation with ext3 or reiser.

Personally, I used to be quite partial to XFS for my partitions with
gobs of large files on them (read: my mythtv backend's video storage),
then had some issues with it, switched to ext3 and haven't had a problem
since. Real Soon Now, I intend to move a bunch of stuff over to ext4...


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[Ben Holland]

Hah, i've seen so many problems with stability with XFS... JFS I haven't
used, but from what i've read it's useful on lots of very large files....
course so would XFS if stability wasn't an issue. reiserFS is good with lots
of tiny files, however again... some friends of mine have had serious
stability problems with resier. ext2 is great on a boot partition, ext3 is
good (not the best) basically on everything i've seen so far. With tweeks
it's very customizable. I would really hate to see ext2 on any DB however as
if your computer crashes for whatever reason your journal files may be
corrupt or non-existant. Also I would assume that running through a disk
check to be vastly faster then rebuilding a db from a backup and logs. I
have not done that though and would very curious from people who've had that
happen. Also ext4 is suppose to fix the whole slow time with fsck I believe.
~Ben


On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod@...> wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 11:43 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > I agree that a partition used for database does not need, and probably
> > should not use a journalling file system if the file system is
> > dedicated to the database. Databases really need (or better would
> > like) raw access to the hardware. it really does not matter from a
> > performance standpoint what filesystem you use for relatively static
> > partitions, such as /boot. Same goes for the root file system is /home
> > and /var are in separate file systems.
> >
> > One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
> > a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
> > home)
>
> On the bright side, we're getting much better with suspend/resume. My
> T61 suspends and resumes perfectly every time these days, and
> docking/undocking is also working flawlessly (including hotplugging the
> PCI-e FireWire 800 card in my dock and the devices hooked to it and my
> external monitor).
>
>
> > IHMO: Most users and servers probably are not going to see much benefit
> > from ReiserFS or JFS in normal operations. In cases where you have
> > specific needs, then certainly the choice of file system and parameters
> > needs to be done.
>
> Nb: one notable drawback of both JFS and XFS: while you can increase
> partition sizes, its impossible to shrink a partition. No such
> limitation with ext3 or reiser.
>
> Personally, I used to be quite partial to XFS for my partitions with
> gobs of large files on them (read: my mythtv backend's video storage),
> then had some issues with it, switched to ext3 and haven't had a problem
> since. Real Soon Now, I intend to move a bunch of stuff over to ext4...
>
>
> --
> Jarod Wilson
> jarod@...
>
>
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[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 13:00 -0400, Ben Holland wrote:
> Hah, i've seen so many problems with stability with XFS... JFS I
> haven't used, but from what i've read it's useful on lots of very
> large files.... course so would XFS if stability wasn't an issue.

XFS had what we'll call a "rough patch" in its devel cycle. Supposedly,
the bulk of the issues have now been resolved and it should be pretty
stable again.

(Nb: I regularly work with our main file system guy, Eric Sandeen, who
is primarily focused on ext3/4 these days during the day, but worked for
SGI on XFS prior to coming to Red Hat, and he still does a fair amount
of work on XFS in his own time -- Fedora actually enables XFS by default
at install time because of work he's done to shore it up).

>  reiserFS is good with lots of tiny files, however again... some
> friends of mine have had serious stability problems with resier. ext2
> is great on a boot partition, ext3 is good (not the best) basically on
> everything i've seen so far. With tweeks it's very customizable.

I've seen a fairly large email shop quite happy with ext3 with some
tweaks to mount options. But I know of an even larger shop where nothing
but reiser could meet their performance needs, though ext4 is actually
close now (for their use case)...

> Also ext4 is suppose to fix the whole slow time with fsck I believe.

Yes, fsck performance is indeed improved over ext3.


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[Derek Atkins]

Jarod Wilson <jarod@...> writes:

> On the bright side, we're getting much better with suspend/resume. My
> T61 suspends and resumes perfectly every time these days, and
> docking/undocking is also working flawlessly (including hotplugging the
> PCI-e FireWire 800 card in my dock and the devices hooked to it and my
> external monitor).

Every once in a while my T60 wont wake up from Suspend.  It'll sit
with a yellow "inu" on the screen and never return.

-derek
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[Jerry Feldman-2]

On Thu, 01 May 2008 12:20:41 -0400
Jarod Wilson <jarod@...> wrote:

> Nb: one notable drawback of both JFS and XFS: while you can increase
> partition sizes, its impossible to shrink a partition. No such
> limitation with ext3 or reiser.

IMHO, that is a very important feature.

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[Jerry Feldman-2]

On Thu, 01 May 2008 12:19:53 -0400
Derek Atkins <warlord@...> wrote:

> Jerry Feldman <gaf@...> writes:
>
> > One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
> > a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
> > home), you might have a full fsck once a month or more frequent. But,
> > you can change both the interval and max count using tune2fs.
>
> Why are you rebooting your laptop that frequently?!?  My laptop
> uptime averages in the 14-21 day timeframe.  I have to reboot periodically
> to perform some win32-only pcmcia-requiring functions so that's usually
> the reason for the reboot.

I shut it down when I leave for work and when I leave work for home.
Actually it's not that much since I sometimes do not power it up at
home. The point I am trying to make is that a laptop has different uses
than a desktop system. I rarely shut down my desktop system.

> > IHMO: Most users and servers probably are not going to see much benefit
> >>From ReiserFS or JFS in normal operations. In cases where you have
> > specific needs, then certainly the choice of file system and parameters
> > needs to be done.
>
> My biggest beef with reiserfs is that if your system ever crashes
> (power hit, kernel bug, hardware problem, etc) you have a LARGE
> liklihood of losing your whole filesystem.  No thank you, I'd like
> my data to stay on the disk and remain accessible even if someone
> pulls the plug on my system.

Over the years when I have used ReiserFS while I have had to recover, I
have never lost an entire filesystem. I came close one time when we had
the installfest at tent city and my system decided to not to work. The
problem at that time was a failing power supply. I was having
intermittent failures, and I finally changed the power supply. In all
cases ReiserFS recovered. Currently, my SuSE 10.3 system is mostly ext3
with 2 filesystems still formatted as reiserfs, and both of these are
used for auto backups.
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[Jarod Wilson]

On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 07:11 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> On Thu, 01 May 2008 12:19:53 -0400
> Derek Atkins <warlord@...> wrote:
>
> > Jerry Feldman <gaf@...> writes:
> >
> > > One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
> > > a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
> > > home), you might have a full fsck once a month or more frequent. But,
> > > you can change both the interval and max count using tune2fs.
> >
> > Why are you rebooting your laptop that frequently?!?  My laptop
> > uptime averages in the 14-21 day timeframe.  I have to reboot periodically
> > to perform some win32-only pcmcia-requiring functions so that's usually
> > the reason for the reboot.
>
> I shut it down when I leave for work and when I leave work for home.
> Actually it's not that much since I sometimes do not power it up at
> home. The point I am trying to make is that a laptop has different uses
> than a desktop system. I rarely shut down my desktop system.

I believe what Derek was asking is 'why do you shut down your laptop
instead of simply suspending it?


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[Jerry Feldman-2]

On Sat, 03 May 2008 12:51:34 -0400
Jarod Wilson <jarod@...> wrote:

> I believe what Derek was asking is 'why do you shut down your laptop
> instead of simply suspending it?

While suspend tends to work better these days, in the past I've found
that the laptop heats up in the backpack. But, this is more of a habbit
than what should be done. I just don't think to suspend any longer.


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[Robert Krawitz-2]

   Date: Sat, 3 May 2008 15:00:06 -0400
   From: Jerry Feldman <gaf@...>

   > I believe what Derek was asking is 'why do you shut down your laptop
   > instead of simply suspending it?

   While suspend tends to work better these days, in the past I've found
   that the laptop heats up in the backpack. But, this is more of a habbit
   than what should be done. I just don't think to suspend any longer.

What about suspend to disk (hibernate)?

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[Scott R. Ehrlich]

On Sat, 3 May 2008, Jarod Wilson wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 07:11 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> On Thu, 01 May 2008 12:19:53 -0400
>> Derek Atkins <warlord@...> wrote:
>>
>>> Jerry Feldman <gaf@...> writes:
>>>
>>>> One issue for laptops is that ext3 has default maximum mount count and
>>>> a check interval. So, if you boot that laptop twice a day (work and
>>>> home), you might have a full fsck once a month or more frequent. But,
>>>> you can change both the interval and max count using tune2fs.
>>>
>>> Why are you rebooting your laptop that frequently?!?  My laptop
>>> uptime averages in the 14-21 day timeframe.  I have to reboot periodically
>>> to perform some win32-only pcmcia-requiring functions so that's usually
>>> the reason for the reboot.
>>
>> I shut it down when I leave for work and when I leave work for home.
>> Actually it's not that much since I sometimes do not power it up at
>> home. The point I am trying to make is that a laptop has different uses
>> than a desktop system. I rarely shut down my desktop system.
>
> I believe what Derek was asking is 'why do you shut down your laptop
> instead of simply suspending it?

One other reason - as I encourage people to shut down instead of
suspend/sleep, is that if they are in a networked environment, the machine
holds network state from location x to location y.  I then get called in
to hear their laptop cannot "talk" on the network, only to find its
network info was from where they were last at (home vs office, hotel vs
home, etc).

I then advise them they should shutdown and reboot, which will purge their
network info and give the system a fresh start the next time it is powered
on... for most TCP/IP situations... except, at times, for those static
addresses...

Scott

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[mbr-2]

If the raw file containing your database is represented inside the
structures used by a filesystem and something in the filesystem gets
trashed, having a journaled database isn't going to help at all because
the journaling information will be inaccessible, since it's also stored
in the trashed filesystem.

So, if you store your database inside a filesystem, double journaling is
unavoidable if you want your data safe.  The preferable alternative is
to avoid the structures involved in a filesystem, and allocate an entire
partition to your database.  Then all you have to worry about is if the
partition table were to get trashed, so make a backup of block 0 of the
disk.

    Mark R.

markw@... wrote:
> IMHO:
> EXT2 is great for a database journal in that you won't be double
> journalling. (I often speculate that a very minimal UNIX file system
> designed for purely for speed and regularly sized blocks, something like a
> streamlined FAT system, would be awesome for databases.)

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[Jerry Feldman-2]

On Sat, 3 May 2008 15:17:55 -0400
Robert Krawitz <rlk@...> wrote:

>    Date: Sat, 3 May 2008 15:00:06 -0400
>    From: Jerry Feldman <gaf@...>
>
>    > I believe what Derek was asking is 'why do you shut down your laptop
>    > instead of simply suspending it?
>
>    While suspend tends to work better these days, in the past I've found
>    that the laptop heats up in the backpack. But, this is more of a habbit
>    than what should be done. I just don't think to suspend any longer.
>
> What about suspend to disk (hibernate)?

I have not thought about it. Normally, I just shut down the laptop out
of habit.


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[markw-4]

> If the raw file containing your database is represented inside the
> structures used by a filesystem and something in the filesystem gets
> trashed, having a journaled database isn't going to help at all because
> the journaling information will be inaccessible, since it's also stored
> in the trashed filesystem.

Depending on the database that may be true, but a block level journaling
database like Oracle or PostgreSQL that is likely not true. I know
PostgreSQL better, so I explain using it as an example.

Assuming an active database, one is which there may  be re-usable space in
existing blocks and PostgreSQL WAL files are fairly constant in size.

Assume that the file system will not be obliterated on a power failure.
That it is robust enough (or simple enough) to merely have lost chains. I
would use something like DOS FAT as a model. Simple to the point of being
stupid.

When a database table grows, it grows in fixed sized blocks (like FAT).
After each database write, fsync is called. Far more often than not, only
the data within a file changes while the disk allocation and file system
information remain constant.

The meta information and file system never needs to be journaled because
the file's "file system" characteristics change relatively infrequently
and when they do, fsync will be called immediately. There will never be
any real benefit from the file system journal and you'll end up doing the
same work twice.

>
> So, if you store your database inside a filesystem, double journaling is
> unavoidable if you want your data safe.  The preferable alternative is
> to avoid the structures involved in a filesystem, and allocate an entire
> partition to your database.  Then all you have to worry about is if the
> partition table were to get trashed, so make a backup of block 0 of the
> disk.
>
>     Mark R.
>
> markw@... wrote:
>> IMHO:
>> EXT2 is great for a database journal in that you won't be double
>> journalling. (I often speculate that a very minimal UNIX file system
>> designed for purely for speed and regularly sized bloc